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E P I L O G U E A Conversation Ten Years Later I sweated through the work of this research project alone. But I always knew I must go back to Carla, Tim’s freshman writing teacher, for two reasons: Her read of the manuscript would be another means to triangulate the data, and I owed her the right to comment on my analyses and interpretations of her courses. So I sent her the manuscript when it was a solid second draft. What resulted was a five-hour conversation that we agreed to tape and use as the basis for this epilogue. Here, you may read the edited version of the transcript, which we collaborated on. The italicized portions represent those sections I felt were most germane to the arguments of this book. Anne: What were some of your thoughts when you read the manuscript? Carla: Tim was atypical in some important ways. He was really good at expressive writing. That was where his talent was. Each student has his own particular strengths and weaknesses as a writer and usually you need their strengths to find their weaknesses as well. So, yeah, he was not uniquely talented as an expressive writer, but talented, and really enjoyed it. So it doesn’t surprise me that he ran into some conflicts as he got further into his majors. A: Why do you think he didn’t enjoy his community writing? C: Because it was constrained and defined by audience, purpose, genre. And it wasn’t an open-ended project in which there was room for him and his personality and his writing style. I think that’s another thing that identified him as a certain type of writer. There are certain types of students who are horrified at open ended-ness and who crave to disappear and become just a kind of medium for the genre. Students have different kinds of experiences with writing. A: And that links to your saying his strength was expressive types of writing and that also defined his views. C: I don’t think that every student has the kind of experience that Tim did as he moved into his major, but every student has some degree of conflict. For some of them, their conflict happens in first year writing , where they’re asked to often just think more originally, to draw 160 COLLEGE WRITING AND BEYOND analytical conclusions of their own — the humanities model. I guess we’re still somewhat attached to that bias in teaching academic genres in first year writing. A: Right. You’re absolutely right. And then— C: Genre is—I mean getting a grasp on academic genres, whether it’s in history or engineering or human biology or philosophy or anything else—is a question of understanding audience and purpose. The paper you told me about that Tim had written, that complex paper in his history class about the orphanage and so on, I think that at the time you were involved in my classes, ten years ago, I still hadn’t really integrated academic writing and community service writing very well. They were just more or less side-by-side. The more I thought about it, the more I realized it was really all about audience and purpose. And you said that was something that Tim recalled and took with him from my class. I encourage my students to understand that, including understanding the context in which they’re writing. If that involves writing an academic essay in a particular course context, they’re obliged to understand what the reader’s expectations are. In other words, the professor ’s expectations, the conventions of writing in that particular field. If they have an idea that’s kind of out of the box . . . I encourage them to think about that risk and decide what their purpose is and what’s most important. Was it more important for Tim to get that down? To connect his experience in Russia with political theory he was encountering in this class, even though he was disappointed with how it was received? He may well have decided that was a risk worth taking. I don’t know. And if he didn’t, if he thought that approaching it that way would be automatically okay, then he wasn’t thinking about audience and purpose. You know, when I came to Southern, my first class here was teaching a writing focus in a physics class. A: Oh really? C...

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